


First of the Immortals

by Phlyarologist



Category: Herbert West - Reanimator - H. P. Lovecraft
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Horror, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-26
Updated: 2015-04-11
Packaged: 2018-03-03 16:59:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2858207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phlyarologist/pseuds/Phlyarologist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU in which Herbert West gets exactly what he was after and everything is wonderful forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. An Awakening

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for this spun off of a line in [Sine Qua Non](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2438624/chapters/5401178), though I hope it'll also be able to stand on its own.

A cold hand peeled back my eyelids. A cold voice said, “Anyone at home?”

My eyes were dry and unfocused, and it was some time before the blobby shapes on my retina congealed into any recognizable image. The power of speech took even longer to return. I felt as though my mouth had been stuffed with cotton. “West?” I said at last.

“Ah. Excellent.” For it was Herbert West leaning over me. “You will no doubt be pleased to hear that your respiration and heart rate are completely normal. Blood pressure remains a little low, but as you’ve successfully regained consciousness I see no cause for concern as yet. How does it feel?”

All sensation remained muffled. By racking my brains I was eventually able to come up with an answer: “Cold.”

West’s fingers were still pinning my eyes open. He blinked so seldom in the normal course of life that perhaps he could not conceive that this would inconvenience me. It was beginning to hurt. “Unsurprising. You’ll warm up soon enough. Meanwhile, do you want a blanket? Coffee? Are you experiencing any paresthesias? Are you hungry?”

“One thing at a time,” I said.

West frowned slightly, and his enthusiasm lost some of its sharp edge. “I suppose,” he said, as though this were a great concession. He finally took his hand away from my eyes, and when my immediate reaction was to squeeze them shut he reacted with sincere alarm. “Don’t you dare go to sleep.”

“Why not?” I opened them again, now they felt slightly less gritty. “Has something happened to me?”

One corner of West’s mouth twitched and then drew outward, exposing a glint of enamel - but no more; he put a stop to the expression before it had time to become a smile. “In a word, yes.”

“And in more than one word?”

“We’ll get to that in time,” he said. “Aside from ‘cold,’ how are you?”

I took stock of my situation. “Something feels... unfamiliar. I can’t remember...”

“Chest pain? Light-headedness? Unusual perceptions?”

“No, yes, and I don’t know.” I swallowed and considered my current position. “Am I to gather I lost consciousness in the laboratory?”

“Precisely that. Perhaps you’re working too hard. You needn’t try to keep up with me, you know, particularly if it so overtaxes your nerves.”

“Are you concerned,” I said, not yet having regained the presence of mind to stop myself, “or are you insulting me?”

“Why, are those my only options?”

I did not answer, instead beginning an ultimately futile struggle to sit up. My body seemed weak and uncoordinated, or else held down by something of weight.

“No, no,” said West, “that won’t do,” and threw a heavy blanket over me.

“Not like you to play nursemaid, West.”

“I have only the one assistant. You are most incredibly useful to me.” That odd spasm twisted his lips again, and again he suppressed it. “A man may protect his own interests without being accused of untoward sentiment.”

“Of course he may,” I said in mock placatory tones. I reached up to arrange the blanket into a more suitable configuration. But my hand was stopped mere inches above the cot on which I lay. I lowered it again and, on a second attempt to raise it, encountered the same resistance and a muted clanking. I pulled up with greater force; my reward was a cry of alarm from West and the feeling of metal biting into my wrist. When a similar trial showed comparable restraint of my other arm, I began to panic. I could not move my feet at all.

Finally West’s sensible monotone interposed itself over my fearful shouting: “You had to be restrained to ensure you wouldn’t hurt yourself - surely you understand that? Whatever popular novels may say to the contrary, a syncopal episode is no laughing matter. You have no history of such fits. How was I to anticipate whether it would devolve into convulsions?”

His face was not as calm as his words, but surely the circumstance at hand accounted for that. I was valuable to him, and he had cause to believe I had been in danger. Lapses in rationality were of course forgivable. “Did it?”

“No,” he said, “I’m pleased to report you were quite peaceful.”

“Then surely” - I rattled the chains fastening me to my place - “you can remove these.”

“That, I fear, would be a trifle premature. You’re still disoriented, confused, and...” West raised his eyebrows. “Uncharacteristically aggressive.”

“I am not -”

“You shouted at me. Hardly appropriate laboratory protocol. No, the restraints stay on until I’m certain you’re stable. Terribly sorry.” He was not sorry at all.

I sighed and sat back. “What was the nature of my collapse, then?” I asked him. “Is there reason to think it will happen again?”

“Hard to say. You should rest, regardless.”

I frowned at him. “I know that, thank you. But to the best of my knowledge, I was in good health, as I have been all my life. If something has changed -”

“Don’t concern yourself unduly. I’m taking care of it.”

“West,” I said, beginning to feel irritated, “perhaps you treat your patients this way - though I hope to God you don’t - but as a friend and a fellow doctor I feel entitled to a little more information.”

“Your collapse was idiopathic -”

“So at the very least tell me what causes you can rule out.” He said nothing. I drew breath and began marshaling stronger terms to use against him, but then made myself damp down my ire lest he have cause to believe me, of all things, _uncharacteristically aggressive_. Besides which, speaking any more forcefully might have done damage to my dry throat. For all his apparent concern on my wakening, he still had not gotten me anything to eat or drink. “Did you administer any treatment, or have I come out of it on my own?”

His mouth twitched. He struggled, and then failed, to bring the offending muscles under control once more. He clamped a hand over his face, to conceal if he could not repress the offending expression. “Pardon me,” he said, the sound somewhat muffled by his fingers, “I am simply overcome with relief to find you well.” And a sound escaped him then that I found so incongruous that it took me a moment to identify. Herbert West was laughing like a child.

I wanted to believe it was no more than he said. I was no longer so naive.

“West,” I said.

He took a moment to collect himself. “What a pity,” he murmured as he lowered his hand. His expression was a trifle less crazed by now, though if he believed he was in full control, he was mistaken. “I had always imagined that when this day came I would be more dignified. I suppose I failed to account for the involuntary physical reaction to… to…”

As my returning consciousness grew stronger and more coherent, I was certain. I could think of only one thing that would provoke such intense emotion in him, and that was not my well-being. “The reagent.”

“The reagent and a strong sedative, yes.”

“I didn’t collapse,” I said. I felt a numbness in my extremities; my thought was stunned; the words came out thick and slow and distorted as if my face had been paralyzed. “I died, didn’t I?”

“Strictly speaking, you did both. One rather led to the other, you know,” said West, with another odd little laugh. “Difficult for a corpse to remain standing unaided.”

“How…?”

“How did you die? That, I’ve yet to discover. I wasn’t lying; it was quite sudden and, you were correct to note, you had always been a hale and hearty specimen until two days ago -”

“Two days?”

“The sedative, remember. No need to take unnecessary chances.” It was then I saw the revolver resting on the endtable at his elbow. I did not have to struggle against my restraints to know it would be well outside the maximum radius that I could reach from here.

My heart - a heart that had recently been bloodless and still - began hammering. When I closed my eyes I could see the pulse of the tiny vessels in my eyelids. The sounds of my circulation, my lungs, all the processes of a body that should have been in the grave, threatened to drown out reason.

But they did not drown out West. “If we cannot determine what went wrong in time, and the same fault prompts another collapse, well. As you yourself can attest, there is little reason to be concerned. I shall simply bring you back and try again. It would be best if you avoided any heavy exertion for the time being, of course. But never fear, I will be monitoring you very closely for any signs of failure.”

My eyes fell on the gun again. West seemed galled by my silence, perhaps expecting a teary outpouring of gratitude, and finally followed my gaze. When he realized what I was looking at instead of him, he sighed enormously and pushed the end table out of my line of sight. “What the devil is wrong with you,” he said, “that you can’t be happy for me for five minutes?”

* * *

He lingered, of course, for much longer than five minutes. By taking stock of the amount of light coming through the windows high above me, I surmised that he stayed by my side throughout the afternoon and well into the night. I was not given the questionable luxury of contemplating my current position and ultimate fate in all this time, as West kept up a monotonous chatter for the duration. This consisted in the main of the most egregious self-congratulation, though he stopped at regular intervals to ask me the same set of questions concerning my health and jot my answers down in a little book. Before long I was answering these monosyllabically and by rote.

“Ah, but now,” he said, several hours after dark, “is there anything you would like to ask me?”

“Do you ever sleep?”

“In the face of such exciting developments, I’m sure I couldn’t, and I’m surprised you can even think of it.” But his expression had all at once grown calm, and he leaned in close to me, staring into my face not as if there were another human being behind it but as if it were an interesting mineral sample or - perhaps more aptly to West’s interests - a dead bird. “Growing testy now, are we?”

“I will confess a certain impatience.”

He sat back and made a note. “That took you long enough.”

I had been awake - alive, perhaps I should say - for at least ten hours now and had neither eaten nor drunk a thing. It is to these factors I attribute my failure to catch his meaning sooner. After some moments, incredulous, I said, “You’re not saying you set out to provoke me on purpose?”

West made more notes, then flicked a bored look up at me. “Given that past trials have yielded mostly violent cannibal maniacs, I would like as many assurances as possible that the same won’t become of you. Surely you would, as well.” He contemplated me a full minute longer, his eyes slightly narrowed, and then said, “You can have bread, if you want it. No meat for the time being.” He got up. “It happens that I’m made of meat.”

“Will you unchain me?”

“Not yet.”

This being the case, when he returned with bread and water, he seated himself next to my head and fed these to me by hand. The process took a deal longer than I would have liked. “You’re not concerned I may bite your fingers off?” I muttered. He immediately withdrew from my reach. “Sarcasm, West.”

“Hardly reassuring - any imbecile can be sarcastic. You’d do less damage to my faith in your recovery if you _had_ bitten me.”

I sighed. “Please give me the rest of the water.” He stared at me warily. “If my word means anything, I will promise not to attack you.”

“Of course you would.”

But he gave me the water, and ultimately unchained me a few hours later when I claimed a need to use the bedpan and he - who had spent a greater proportion of his lifetime elbows-deep in corpses than most - was aghast at the idea of assisting me with the maneuver.

* * *

“What will you do next?”

We were eating breakfast, and I suspected this in itself was another experiment. West continued to insist I should have only bread - or rather, had said I was welcome to try meat but he would feel obliged to chain me up again after, and was alarmingly vague on the planned duration of such restraint. This morning he had at least been so generous as to let me put jam on it. He had then proceeded to pan-fry a steak and was now eating it in front of me. No doubt I was meant to notice, in case I got ideas, that he held a knife and had placed his gun on the table by his other elbow. I knew, however, that he had never used a knife as a weapon and was a poor shot with his left hand.

“How do you mean?” he said, before very deliberately carving off a piece of the steak and placing it in his mouth.

“The reagent works. You have accomplished all you meant to, and you’re only -” I paused, uncertain after all of how old he was. I had assumed he was about my age, but as he always looked the same from year to year I had little evidence to support this. “Presumably a number of years remain to you.”

West chuckled. “To put it mildly. The reagent works, as you say. I see no reason my years should ever come to an end at all.”

The thought gave me pause: Herbert West, eternal.

But why should that be such a terrifying prospect? Surely, with death subdued, he would have no reason to continue generating such horrors for all time as he had in the past decade. That research was completed now, or nearly so. There would be no cause to fear him after his end had been achieved. “Perhaps, then, you could put an end to other illnesses or infirmities. With the danger gone, you could move on to eliminating the pain and the inconvenience -”

“No,” he said, with a brusque wave of his hand, “no, that’s not interesting. An unworthy use for my intellect. Assume, as we do, that I shall soon defeat mankind’s greatest adversary - you suggest that afterward I should reduce myself to something so mundane?”

His scorn surprised me. “So mundane as the practice of medicine? The very thing we went to school for?”

“As far as I am concerned, medicine has been solved. I shall gladly leave issues of ordinary maintenance to whatever tinkerer wishes to take them up. I cannot concern myself with that.”

“The reduction of human suffering is and has been -”

“Boring.”

“- one of my major incitements to take up these experiments with you, West. I should like to know what you think is so damned much more important.”

Several seconds elapsed. West’s expression crystallized into the purest image of indifference. “I’ve yet to decide. I shall have to think about it. In the meantime” - he produced that accursed notebook from the night before - “you just swore at me. Are you conscious of any increasing disequilibrium, or is it occurring on a level you cannot perceive?”

I understood the trajectory of this question at once, and struggled to suppress my dismay. I did not wish to be chained up again. I said, “I am not going mad, I promise you.” I ate my toast.

He watched me some time longer, then pocketed the notebook again and favored me with the merest ghost of a smile. “Such is my hope as well.” He leaned over and patted my hand, in a motion as awkward as if he had learned it by rote memorization of Figures 1 through 3 of a monograph on friendly reassurance and the text of that monograph had been in untranslated Hungarian. “But we shall have to wait and collect more data, hm?”

He sat back and returned his attentions to the steak. It smelled delicious.

* * *

It was not until nightfall, over a day since my sudden awakening, that West consented to let me out of his sight. He had emptied out a locked and windowless storage room attached to the laboratory, and into this he had dragged a mattress.

“How long have you had this ready?” I asked him. He only raised his eyebrows, shoved a bucket into my hands, and locked me in.

Then I was alone.

For so long I had wondered what lay on the other side of death. Now it seemed I had been to that country and returned, and never known the difference. I lay down in the dark and pressed two fingers to my jugular vein. There was a pulse there. I counted the beats - my heart ran on as if it had never stopped.

But he assured me it had, and none of his behavior over the past day and a half made sense in any other context. I had to accept, then, that I had died, and that it had gone unnoticed by any but West. I myself had not marked it. We were, if West was telling the truth, wholly ignorant of its cause. I could remember nothing of my own demise. In a way I felt I had been cheated of something essential.

Yet despite my disquiet, I drifted eventually to sleep. In my dreams, West stood over me, watching in silence, his lips twitching, his face threatening to break into a grin of mad delight. I tried to question him, but could not speak; one of his hands held a syringe, and the other was clamped around my throat.

Morning came, and West unlocked the door. He asked how I had slept. For the first time I can recall, I lied to him.

 


	2. An Epiphany

The next three days continued in like fashion. West kept me confined in his home and subjected me to constant questions and tests - of sensory function, of reflexes, and perhaps more than anything else, tests of my patience. And at night he insisted, for his own peace of mind, that I must be shut up in the dark storeroom with its crypt-like silence. It was this part of the experience I found most unbearable. My dreams grew more lurid with each passing night, and as each day furnished no new material for my unconscious mind to mull over, their subject was always and only Herbert West, my friend and my jailer. He lurked in every corner, watching me and smiling to himself, and I knew, as one knows in dreams, that he was plotting against me some unfathomable ill.

But daylight came and showed the real Herbert West absent any evident malice toward my person - only rather irritating and, even four days after the fact, insufferably smug.

Thus, on the fifth day after my resurrection and desperately desirous for a change of scenery, I made him an appeal. “West, would you say my recovery has been proceeding apace?”

He looked up briefly from the newspaper, from which he had discarded unread every section but the obituaries. “I’ve no complaints.”

“Then I wish to propose a next step in the rehabilitation process.”

“Do you want an egg?” he said, and pushed his plate toward me. I had noted that in the days since my death he had been much more consistent about eating breakfast than at any prior time in our acquaintance. Even if it was for the purely practical purpose of making my life hell, I could not help looking on the change favorably.

And in truth the offer of something to supplement days of dry toast almost distracted me from my purpose, but I resolved to stand firm in the face of anything short of a half-pound of bacon. “I’d like to go outside this afternoon. A brief walk only, but I feel I’m up to the challenge of an uncontrolled environment.”

The newspaper crackled and almost tore between West’s hands. “You’re certain of that?”

“Even you get out sometimes, albeit mainly to steal new subjects. Is it so unfathomable that I’ve been feeling a bit cramped?”

“We still don’t know why you died in the first place. Too much exertion could -”

“Is it your intention I should return to assisting you in the laboratory someday? Or did you revive me just to be ornamental?”

My tone was perhaps harsher than advisable, given West’s customary reaction to any display of temper. But after a moment he sighed and put the newspaper down, and I saw that the gamble had been successful. “I shall have to go with you and supervise.”

“I assumed.”

“And bring a supply of the reagent, should anything happen to you. Although -” And for a moment I saw an unusual expression cross his features, one of intense distaste and dismay.

“Although?” I prompted him.

“Never mind. Eat the damned egg; it was overcooked in any case.”

* * *

West showed a subtly mounting anxiety over the course of the morning, and filled a large valise with all manner of medical paraphernalia for which, in the brief walk I proposed, I could conceive absolutely no use. He shot me looks of tight-lipped disapproval when he thought I was not looking. 

“I don’t suppose you can be dissuaded,” he said around noon.

“I’m not going to escape.”

“Of course you’re not; where else would you go? That is not and was never the source of my…” I thought of supplying a word for him, but everything that came to mind he would have taken as a profound insult. I nearly did it anyway. “Misgivings,” he said at last.

“Have faith in your reagent, if nothing else.”

“Faith,” he said loftily, “is for imbeciles.” But he did not elaborate on what his misgivings might be, and I maintained that I would not abandon my plan unless he did, and so at three o’clock I had my first breath of fresh air since the day I died. Herbert West, scowling and nervous, was never more than half a step behind.

He had never supplied me any calendar date for my death or revival, despite my occasional queries. But when I emerged into the light, I knew. It was late August or early September - what I had always considered Arkham’s most genial season, with the worst of the heat beginning to bleed off and the days still long and sweet. West preferred October, one of the few windows of time wherein it was neither too hot to preserve a corpse nor too cold to break ground, and wherein the nights came early enough to conceal such distasteful deeds as our work required - but my concerns were perhaps less pragmatic than his. This had been a mild summer even at its peak, and so the grass was a deeper green than July often leaves it and the trees all arrayed in lush foliage. Birds sang above, but lazily, the territorial wars of spring behind them and the scarcity of winter some time off yet. Even the potter’s field - visible from here as from any place West and I would ever have chosen to live - even it was fresh and beautiful to my eyes.

“I should like to walk down to the stream,” I announced, knowing West would disapprove of any movement made without such a declaration of intent.

Even thus forewarned, he made sounds of indignation and announced, “I’m against it, professionally speaking.”

I pantomimed writing his objection down in a little book like the one he carried, and to the stream we went. A very minor tributary to the Miskatonic, it ran quite low at this time of year, but still possessed enough animation in its play over the rocky bed to put forth a refreshing chatter. My spirits lifted to see and to hear it, and for quite some time I halted in my perambulations simply to stand and watch it in its wooded course.

“Has something happened?” said West, off to my left. His tone was some hybrid of attempted sarcasm and real concern. “Shall I note ‘strange fascination with running water’ as a side effect, as in some Old World superstitions? You do realize this stream has been here all along, I’m sure. You could’ve gazed rapturously on it at any time.”

“But I never did.”

“Precisely. Why start now?” I did not look at him, but heard him shifting uneasily on the grass at my side. “Let’s go back in.”

“No, not yet.” I breathed deep of the warm air. It smelled of dirt, mostly, and of the previous year’s leaf mold - but even that was marvelous after my confinement. “What’s got you so nervous?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. I think it rather beneath your dignity to go about impersonating a bloodhound, but if that is your sincere wish…” Evidently unable to come up with a suitably dire end to the sentence, he trailed off into sour silence.

I paid him little heed. It was true I had not often looked on this land in sunlight. I had been too consumed with our research, or else I had been sleeping fitfully through the day in preparation for the clandestine endeavors of the night to come. My death was not the first time West and I had spent days without venturing outside. I had never paid any heed to the simple beauty surrounding us. Then I had died.

If West had not injected me with the reagent, I would never have seen any of this again. I would never again have heard the avian babble I’d always taken for granted, nor trampled grass under my feet, nor felt the breeze on the back of my neck. All of this, if not for West, should have been lost to me forever. It was a fine day and clear, and one that I had very nearly never lived to see.

“West,” I said - and how had I not marveled, any of the countless times I had done it before, that I had the power of speech and the facilities to hear it? That I had reason, and will, and life? How had I gone about my days with so little care for the rarity and fragility of my existence? My voice came out hushed and strangely choked, and that, too, astounded me. That, too, was a marvel. “You have my gratitude.”

“What,” he said snidely, “only now?”

“I’m sorry.” I shook my head. “I couldn’t understand then exactly how much you had done.”

When I turned to him, his eyes went wide and he took a step back, horror at the sight of me written over every inch of his aspect. “Stop that at once.”

“West -”

“I mean it. I - I shall - I’ll just stand over there and avert my eyes. Yes. That’s what I’ll do. So - for God’s sake, man, pull yourself together.” He pointed to a spot about five feet distant and quickly made good on his word by retreating there, folding his arms, and staring decidedly at a tree.

I found myself smiling wryly even as I struggled to blink the offending moisture from my eyes. “‘For God’s sake?’ I think you mean for yours.”

“A figure of speech, as you know. I’ve as little regard for any god or gods as -”

“I owe you a further apology.”

Though I could see him only in profile at this point, I noted that West raised his eyebrows and nearly looked toward me again before stopping himself. “Go on.”

“Any doubts I have ever had about your work - its principles, its ethics, the less conventional aspects of its conduct - I must admit now that they were wrong.” I looked up at the blue expanse overhead. “Death is … such a vast and incomprehensible thing. Any means to the end of conquering it must be justified.” I felt the sun on my face, and it was miraculous.

“Of course I’m very pleased you’ve come around,” said West, his voice taut with obvious discomfort, “but if you could extend your gratitude to curtailing this disgustingly sentimental spectacle, I would be much obliged.”

“Sentimental? You’ve given me the world back, and you think this is -”

“Yes. It is. And quite enough excitement for one day; we are going back inside. Now. Come along.”

I followed him back to the house without further objection. This incredible stiffness in his demeanor, which suddenly inspired in me some mixture of amusement and pity, did not ease until we were safely enclosed by four walls and he was assured I would not start weeping at the unassuming majesty of a volumetric flask.

* * *

I saw West’s face, distorted. There was a shimmer in the air between us that rendered his features indistinct and slightly out of proportion, and in this light the quality of his expression shifted from one grotesque parody of humanity to another. Behind his head stretched out a blue swath of afternoon sky, decorated here and there by scraps of cloud, and it was some time before I understood why this troubled me. It gave the impression that West was looking down at me, or I up at him. In reality I stood a good five inches taller than him and had, in our undergraduate days, occasionally put laboratory glasswares on shelves he could not reach simply to be a nuisance. I had lacked then my current reservations against angering him - or perhaps what was truly lacking was an understanding of what he was. 

Perhaps I was lying down. That would account for the apparent reversal of our heights. This was not, after all, so very different from what I had seen when I had first awakened from death. I felt fully as cold now as I had then, and the odd sensation of weightlessness was familiar to me as well. But on that occasion my eyes had adjusted after a time; now the image of West refused to coalesce into anything firm but remained an abstraction in shifting colors.

In some time staring at him I received the impression that his mouth was moving, though I could not hear a word. I thought I should ask him to speak louder, but it was some time before the muscles of my face heeded my instruction. And when my mouth opened, I wished they had taken longer still. For as soon as I did, water poured into my mouth - water so cold it made my teeth ache, water moving so strongly and rapidly it had entered my lungs before I knew a thing, and I could not close my mouth again. I began to thrash about and attempted to raise my head clear of the torrent, but my progress was arrested by a pressure on my shoulders. Above me, Herbert West slowly shook his head.

Water continued to flood my nose and mouth. I would not last long this way. I made another desperate attempt to rise, and this time succeeded. My head broke the plane of water between me and West, and as I coughed and struggled for air I heard him say, in disinterested tones, “That’s quite enough of that.”

In my panicked flailing and spluttering I nonetheless apprehended a terrible fact: it was his hands on my shoulders. As he leaned forward to bear me down beneath the surface again, he said, “You’d better not remember this, even if the reagent works.” I struggled, but he was stronger than he had any right to be, and lying as I was on the bottom of a stream I did not have the leverage to resist him long. “Come now,” he said in the last moments before my strength failed, “you mustn’t take this so personally. You’ll be back soon enough.”

The water closed over me again. My vision began to blur and gray, and as water replaced air in my lungs a strange languor came over me. I went still, and let the images I had seen in the few seconds I had been above the surface fill my mind. How odd, I recall thinking, that he should choose to drown me in the same place we’d gone walking that afternoon.

I woke in the darkness of the storeroom, shivering uncontrollably despite the relative warmth of my prison. A dream; it had all been a dream; I assured myself of this repeatedly, both in my mind and aloud.

And yet - if not for fear I would remember some sinister incident on the banks of the stream, why had West been so set against my going out?

* * *

Of course, many things seem conceivable in the midnight hours which morning light exposes as ridiculous, and my conviction that West had murdered and reanimated me in secret was one such. West was a cold-blooded creature, certainly, bordering on the reptilian, but I had only known him to kill for one of two reasons. The first was self-defense, which was clearly not in play; the second was the prospect of some scientific gain. I could fathom no profit to him in killing me. 

“You look unwell,” he said when he unlocked the door.

“Perhaps I’m anemic,” I said dryly.

“Yesterday’s exertion may have overwhelmed your system,” he said. “We don’t yet know much about the effects of this final formulation.”

“I doubt that. If anything, earlier subjects only became the stronger for having -”

“But the _final_ formulation,” West insisted, “is different. Come along.” He all but dragged me to the kitchen, where he forced upon me a plate of eggs slightly less scorched than on the day previous, pulled out his notebook, and subjected me to the longest and most intensive questioning yet. It was under this examination that I finally admitted to a slight difficulty with sleeping, though naturally I held back the particulars.

“I wonder,” said West. “That creature in Sefton Asylum…” He trailed off, staring thoughtfully into the middle distance with a look of displeasure.

“Halsey?”

West’s eyes came back into focus, and I was sorry to be on the receiving end. “I was certain I told you never to speak that name. Its owner is dead, and the story ends there. Do you want us discovered? Especially in your current state - the moralistic outcry from such undeveloped intellects -”

I held up a placatory hand. “What about the creature in the Asylum? I profess complete ignorance of all things concerning its origins or disposition, or any uncanny resemblance to persons thought deceased.”

West scowled and did not immediately resume the thread of his prior discourse. But at last he said, “I’ve been unable to inquire about it much without arousing suspicion - but all evidence is that it never sleeps at all. That effect may be attenuated with the current formulation, but perhaps some impurity still remains.”

What I said next was partly in jest, but the greater part was this: as soon as the words occurred to me, I knew I needed to know how West would react to them. And so I said, with all the gallows nonchalance I could muster, “Perhaps you can make some refinements and wait until the next time I die.”

There was a long silence. West did not grow pale or evince any other sign of surprise, remorse, or fear. After a time, however, his bearing took on a character of moral offense. “I don’t find that amusing,” he said at last.

I could not have imagined a more inconclusive result had I tried. But it had been only a dream, after all. There was little enough sense trying to falsify in the real world what had only sprung from my own mind; and clearly the image of my only friend on Earth staring down as he methodically drowned me in the stream was purest phantasy.


	3. The Rubicon

I did not realize to what extent West had put his work on hold for me until, about a week since my awakening, he resumed it. He was hesitant as well to let me help him; he would mutter vague and ominous things about “vapors” or “inherent instability” and after an hour’s work insist I go stand apart some distance and read a book. He had a number of books now that I could not remember seeing before my death, on a variety of subjects that I knew did not interest him in any way. A majority had come from the library, but some were clearly stolen and some, in a circumstance I found confusing, appeared to be both.

“You didn’t go to all this trouble for me, did you?” I asked him. He frowned and didn’t answer. “It would’ve been more practical to invest that effort in a proper fume hood -”

“Don’t speak to me about practicality,” he snapped, “and don’t stand so close. Do you want to die?”

I took a step back, but began to wonder: had that been a well-intentioned warning, or a threat?

I did not read the books, but only watched him and tried to divine his true purpose. That he was manufacturing an enormous volume of the reagent was clear to me, but he made no accompanying effort to obtain new test subjects. Given his apparent apprehensions about the reagent’s reliability - evidenced in his treatment of me - I did not believe he was simply creating it to stockpile for the future. He had abandoned as well his side experiments with disembodied tissues in order to focus only on this. He must have some definite goal, but its nature remained opaque.

I remembered the awful images that dogged my sleep and suppressed a shudder, but I did not dare speak to him of those dreams. He would assure me they were only phantasms, or he would tell me they were not, or else he would shoot me. Each outcome I could imagine held its own horrors, and I could not will myself to face any of them.

I picked up a book: an adventure novel about Antarctica, as wholly outside the realm of West’s interests as anything I could find. He would not ask me about it, or would not attend to my answers. I sat down and held it open before me, and over the tops of the pages I watched Herbert West in his natural habitat.

Before long I was struck with a realization: he was much more efficient without me. I had thought that I followed his instructions exactly, and that he and I worked together like hand in glove. But he was capable of doing all of this alone without a word spoken, his movements finely calibrated to every task, from slicing out human and animal glands to isolating the needed extracts to maintaining all the apparatus. I wondered if I had been holding him back from greater progress. Perhaps - given the form his progress so often took - it was better that I had.

But perhaps West had realized the same thing, and this was why he wanted me dead.

I shook my head at the thought. If he wanted me dead, he could do better than to revive me each time he got what he wanted. Even if he was the better chemist of us two, I had other uses, including but not limited to rudimentary social skills and the ability to lift more than thirty pounds.

I became aware of how long I had been staring at him and, lest he become suspicious, lowered my eyes to the adventure story. I even, for a time, attempted to read it, but the harsh and icy frontier it depicted could not hold my interest more than the forbidden lands West and I had devoted our lives to charting: the black country of death itself.

I would not question him now, and dared not act against him. I needed more information.

* * *

 West’s mood was unusually variable in the days that followed. I remembered this same volatility from our student days; this oscillation between smug triumph and snappish ill temper had closely followed the success or failure of his earliest trials in animals. And yet he was conducting no experiments now that I knew of, only refining the process needed to generate large volumes of reagent.

“We’ll need to make an excursion,” he said one evening. “I’m nearly out of pituitary glands. They don’t keep in this weather, not nearly as well as I would like.”

“Have you anyone in mind?” I asked him. Immediately I cringed at the infelicity of my choice of language. I had meant to ask whether he knew of a recent burial, but could now easily imagine him going on the hunt for persons in good health who would not be missed. I did not doubt the thought would furnish me with any number of unsavory dreams now it had once occurred to me.

But to my immense relief, he only slapped a shovel into my hand. “A family of five, all found dead of a fever. More than we can carry, obviously, so I’ll have to extract the brains _in situ_ and hope for the best. Carry this, too.” He handed me a bucket of ice.

My recollection becomes confused at this point. West handed me the bucket of ice and we went outside, but after that time I cannot testify to the sequence of events. As far as I am able to reconstruct a chronology, my next memory is of the taste of soil and a dull pain blooming at the base of my skull.

I scrabbled in the dirt, I remember, finding little purchase; bits of soil and a fine gravel were driven up under my fingernails, but I lacked the strength or the leverage to get upright. It occurred to me after a moment, when the disorientation faded, that I might wish after all to stay down.

“That’s right,” said a distorted voice. A foot disturbed the dirt just to the right of my head. I strained to focus my eyes upon it: a small, sensible shoe attached to a thin trouser leg. “I don’t enjoy this any more than you do, I promise that.” The sound was impossibly warped, sliding up and down the octave with no regard for human inflection, and I seemed to hear the echo of the words before I heard the words themselves. I had suffered head trauma, clearly, which could be expected to play a certain level of mischief with my senses - but did that necessarily rule out the presence of demons in this world? Could it not be both that I had suffered a blow and that what stood over me now was a chthonic beast in human skin?

I rolled onto my back. No, I realized: what stood over me then was Herbert West with a bloody shovel. The gravel I had struggled in was chips of ice - the bucket lay upended not far from where I had fallen.

“You, at least, are spared remembering this,” said West.

“I remember the stream,” I said.

His eyes widened. There was fire in them, and fear; he had a thousand shadows; his skin was leaking a pale light. He said, “Is that so?”

I do not know what happened next. My teeth were sunk into the soil of the potter’s field, his foot was on my shoulder, and I heard the metallic whistle of air passing over a flat surface as it swung toward me from the rear. I woke in the storage room. Morning in the laboratory was business as usual. 

* * *

What I found most disturbing about my dreams, before long, was my inability to distinguish them from reality. I did not know at any time whether I slept or woke. Nor did I know how much time had passed - I knew the season was turning, but I did not know how quickly, whether I had lost a few hours or days or weeks. West permitted me no contact with the outside world even now, and was not in possession of a calendar. I was afraid to ask him questions, lest he begin to suspect what I suspected. I tried for a time to monitor the phases of the moon, but I was generally in rooms without windows, and at any rate soon began to distress myself with speculation: I might well know how far into a month we were, but what was to tell me which month? Which year? West did not age, and if I spent much of this time dead, neither would I. I could not look for changes in myself to guide an estimate. Even my hair and fingernails had stopped growing; the reagent restored some life processes, clearly, but not all. It could have been any amount of time since my death, and after tormenting myself with the thought for every waking hour I eventually lost the desire to know.

The more pressing issue became this. I struggled to find something in the world that I could confirm, securing a foothold against the tidal pull of my dreams. What could I rely upon to remain unchanging? Might there be something on the premises of our home and my prison that West could not tamper with? Perhaps I could check this something each time I woke, and know if it was changed that what I saw could not be real.

But the business of trying to predict what West would do - or what he would not do - was a dangerous and uncertain one, especially now. For some days (what I believed to be days; what could have been decades) after I made this resolve, I had found no foundation to which I might affix my sanity and could only wait quietly and observe his habits, while by night I saw things that cast a shadow of sinister implication over the most mundane of his doings. Until I could find some external way to confirm my reality, I could not know what was true and what had sprung from my own mind or the reagent’s subtle actions upon the same; and even then I should never know the truth of what had occurred before I found it.

There were no mirrors in the house, I noted, and could not recall whether this had always been the case. Was it possible West had removed them so I could never examine my own body for proof of what he had wrought upon me?

From the instant this thought occurred to me, I had no more rest. I did not wish to believe he had harmed me, but I could not prove otherwise, and it seemed chillingly within the bounds of his character. Several times in the laboratory he reproved me for my evident distraction, little knowing I was trying to gain a glimpse of my reflection in the curved surface of the receiving flask, searching for signs of the violence he might or might not have done me. There should, if I were not mad, be the purpling imprint of a belt buckle pressed into my throat; there should be bruising, petechiae. In these distorted glimpses I saw nothing to confirm my fears, but likewise not enough to show them false.

The deaths I endured in that time are too varied and numerous to recount. I was stabbed, suffocated, poisoned, and choked; I was frozen to death, starved, dehydrated, stabbed again. Anything that did not destroy my internal workings beyond repair was fair game, and between West’s medical degree and his accursed reagent there was a great deal that he could repair. From each death I would awaken in the darkness and solitude of my room, soaked in perspiration, my nose and mouth filled with a vile and clinging residue that seemed to me to bear the taste of undiluted fear.

I would awake, and I would inspect myself and my surroundings for any evidence that what I had seen was true, but I could not turn on a light for fear of alerting West. In those dark hours of the morning I could not bear the thought of his presence.

There was never a mark on me, as far as I could determine - but as I have said, there were no mirrors. In my dreams, if dreams they were, he killed me in ways I would not see. I supposed too that he must inject the reagent into a vein not visible to my own scrutiny, though of course I was unable to account for that time. Still I searched each day for puncture wounds, for any bruising or soreness around likely injection sites. I continued to find nothing.

“How are you sleeping?” said West, and I did not know which West was speaking. Was he a doctor inquiring after his patient, a researcher wondering when his assistant might return to duty, or a murderer slyly probing a past and future victim for any knowledge of his crimes?

“Beg pardon?” I said, not wishing him to know the difficulty I faced. My answer must depend on his intentions in asking, but these I could not yet guess.

“You reported you were sleeping poorly. You’ve been among the living for a month; is that still the case?”

If he were my friend, or if he were truly motivated by creating the perfect remedy for death, I should answer honestly. He would, in his own fashion, try to help me. If he were my friend - but I did not want to take the risk that he was not. “No,” I told him. “I sleep about as soundly as before.”

“Dreams?”

“Nothing abnormal.”

He stared thoughtfully up into my face for some time, and I began to wonder if he would call me a liar. But he only smiled, and for the first time I could remember the expression was empty of malice or of madness. “Then we’ve done it.” 

* * *

West was a paranoiac and had been so for years. The essence of science was a repeatable procedure, but the essence of not being torn apart by the undead was avoiding as far as possible any kind of regular habit. To manufacture the reagent he must have a fixed base of operations; to prevent past subjects from destroying him he must not get too comfortable there. His entire existence depended by now on a carefully calibrated balance between these opposing principles.

And yet - as I watched him for any murderous intent, as gradually he became more confident of my recovery and began to allow me some paltry freedoms - in time a pattern emerged. I cannot fairly say that he became careless, as his hours became rather more irregular than less and his comings and goings throughout the laboratory and other rooms of the house were maddeningly arbitrary, to the point of seeming without purpose. No - he was perhaps _too_ careful. All other things were variable, but after a long period of observation I had found the one constant: there was one cabinet I had never seen him open. Having grasped this much, I soon became aware that he would never even look at it, at least not in my presence. It seemed to me that one as wary and as constitutionally restless as he was should have from time to time let his eyes fall in its direction by pure chance. This was no apathy, but a pointed omission. Whatever was within, he did not wish me to think of it.

I was certain that while I lived it had contained something mundane and unworthy of such subterfuge, but due to that very mundanity I should never be able to recall what. I began also to avoid the sight of that cabinet and its unassuming wooden door, while my mind churned over what ghastly possibility might now lie in such a small space. If it were something so precious and secret to West, surely he would have placed it in a container that could be locked - but if there were nothing evil in it, he would not behave as he did. The more care I took not to look upon or to reference it, the more my preoccupation with its contents grew, until the conviction took hold of me that if I could only open it all my questions should be answered. I should know immediately why and how, and how many times, I had died, and what West meant to accomplish with all of this. All I needed was to be free from his scrutiny long enough to see to it.

“Won’t anyone wonder what has become of our practice?” I asked him one evening at the meal that passed for breakfast, as he had never gone to bed until noon and expected me to keep the same much-disturbed sleep schedule. “I assume you had it put out that we were closing down for a time due to my illness, but hadn’t you better make some show of returning to business?”

He snorted. “You suppose we’re still going to require business after my research is done? We’ll never want for anything again.”

“Perhaps, but as I recall, the reagent confers no immunity to angry mobs.”

“It _might,_ ” he said, but then we both fell silent. I was gripped by the memory of what had become of Dean Halsey and certain reports in the papers of what it had taken to subdue him at last. West, I suspect, was thinking of the same. “Still,” he said, too briskly, “if you introduced the topic in hopes I might take up some other hobby than nagging you” - his smile was faint and supercilious - “you are in luck. Or, rather, you shall at least have a brief respite from my presence. I have been planning some further refinements to our laboratory process that will require glasswares of a very particular character. Nothing for it but to have them bespoke. Consequently, I shall be meeting with a craftsman in town tomorrow afternoon.”

“And leaving me the run of the house?” I said, incredulous.

“You must have read that blasted novel seventeen times by now.” I winced, realizing that perhaps at some point I ought to have changed out the book I was using to cover my ruminations. “And if anyone is watching the house, I expect this to confuse them terribly. Let your shadow be seen at the windows after I’m gone, but under no provocation must you answer the door.”

“You aren’t concerned I’ll rummage through your things?” I should not have said it. If the idea had not occurred to him, I should not have been the one to introduce it.

“We have few enough secrets now, haven’t we? I can’t imagine you would find it very enlightening.” He gestured idly with his fork. “Do bear in mind, if the temptation strikes, that I saved you when I could have left you to perish.”

This was my opportunity, then. When he left, all his secrets would be mine. 

* * *

I was heartily disappointed to learn, the following afternoon, that “all his secrets” comprised an untidy pile of financial documents. I began to wonder if this had all been a trap. Had he meant to trick me into reading these? Should I be made to suffer for displaying any knowledge of their contents? Had he perhaps so arranged the cabinet so that he would immediately see the proof of my tampering? Maybe it was a test, and one I had failed; maybe he would use this evidence to further restrict my freedoms, or maybe he would kill me properly this time.

I could not know. But sure in any case that some threshold had been passed, I must at least try to arm myself with any knowledge I could. I must hope that my trespass was not for nothing.

After careful and prolonged examination of the evidence, I learned two things. The first was that Herbert West’s fiscal condition was a shambles; it seemed he’d had little to no income since August, at a time I suspected would coincide with my initial collapse. I could not help smiling bitterly at this revelation. When I had spoken of a return to medical practice I had meant it, just as he surmised, as a means of getting him away from me for a time, but it seemed I had chosen precisely the right concerns to fake. And today he was only racking up more expenditures. Either he had complete confidence that the reagent would make us wealthy, or he was an idiot.

The second revelation was in the nature of one of these invoices. Apparently, sometime in September, he had contracted to have a small building on the premises supplied with electricity. The house had already been powered before my death, besides which it was not small, and I had not been aware of any outbuildings.

This must be where West conducted his real experiments. The laboratory in the house had been given over entirely to synthesis for some time now, and I had given up on wondering why, my other concerns having become far too pressing. But however much we produced, he was not storing it here. And if this other building was only a warehouse for reagent, he would not need the risk or the expense of providing it with electricity.

I continued my search through the documents in hopes of finding something that would point to the building’s location; if it was of recent construction I should find evidence of that here. I thought it rather sloppy of West to leave so many crucially important documents in the same place - though in another person, and in another circumstance, this same behavior would have been sensible or even fastidious. Thus when I could find no bill or schematic for the building that should not exist, I took it to mean it had existed long before I had died - since at least the previous year, or perhaps even longer.

“Few enough secrets,” I muttered, “indeed.”

The best I could determine, from that original invoice, was an approximate distance in yards from the house proper to this secondary structure. But West returned before I could make my survey. I only scribed the number on my memory and resolved to find it the next time he went out. I assured him all had been well in his absence; he told me his errand had met with success; little more was said. 

* * *

Some time later - I do not know how long - West subjected me to another round of questioning, and jotted down my answers in his book. It had been a while since the last time he had done this, though again, I cannot estimate the time more precisely than that. At the conclusion of the interview he shut the book and said, “I account myself almost entirely satisfied. You will be free of these bothersome questions soon. However.” He uncrossed his legs and stood. “There is still need for a few tests, of a rather different nature.” He began rummaging through the items atop the table beside me, and when he turned back to me with a syringe it was all I could do not to flinch away. But I saw then that it was empty. “Your arm, please; I’ll need a blood sample.”

I hesitated briefly before rolling up my sleeve. His bearing and voice were perfectly calm and professional, but knowing what his profession entailed, I could draw only so much reassurance from the fact. And he, soon thereafter, could draw only so much blood; he encountered a certain difficulty in finding a vein, as they seemed to have receded further under my skin.

“What is this?” he said mockingly. “A fear response? How childish of you. Make a fist, if you would.”

I did so, but he had been more correct than he knew, and now more than my existing concerns about Herbert West I had also to worry that my own body would betray me to him - that he would divine somehow all that I dreaded and all that I meant to do. But after a moment he leaned back, having gotten what he wanted. He regarded the syringe of my blood and gave the barrel a thoughtful flick. “That should do,” he said, and swabbed something over the puncture site inside my elbow and set the sample aside.

This done, he commenced a number of minor physical tests of coordination or reflex, pausing every few minutes to measure my vital signs, and seeming more and more pleased with each result. I thought my responses wholly unremarkable, though for some reason I could not bring to mind the normal reference ranges we had established for each parameter, and somehow I kept forgetting my own performance soon after each test was done. Regardless I felt his excitement was excessive. “Haven’t we already shown that the reagent has done its work?” I said. “That I am normal?”

He didn’t answer, only gestured as if he were about to throw something into my face, and made approving noises and noted something in his book when I recoiled and closed my eyes.

“West,” I protested, “this is all getting rather silly -”

“Silly? Do you imagine I get some amusement from this?” His tone was an attempt at lofty offended dignity, but his mouth twitched, and I could see teeth. “What is five multiplied by the square root of sixty-four?”

“Forty, but -”

“That’s very interesting.”

“Basic arithmetic is interesting?”

“No.”

“Then is it my capacity for calculations? Do you…” My mouth felt unaccountably dry, and it took longer than I wanted to summon up the words. “Are you implying that I’m stupid?”

“Not in the slightest,” he said, and once again measured my pulse and blood pressure and respiratory rate, and once again found the results oddly delightful.

“West,” I said, “I’m tired. Can we please stop this? Are you not satisfied yet?”

“We’re nearly done, I promise you,” he said; his voice held a note of ill-suppressed glee. He asked me a few more mathematics questions, which, tired as I was, I found increasingly difficult to answer. My eyelids were sinking and my limbs felt heavy, and still he kept testing me.

I felt that I should like to snap at him, save that the idea of getting angry was exhausting. It was all I could manage to plaintively mutter, “West, that’s enough. I want to go to bed.” Some removed part of me wondered at the phrase. When, since my death, had I ever _wanted_ to go to bed? A bed no longer represented a place of peaceful repose. And strictly speaking, I had none in any case, only a mattress in a storeroom…

My thoughts wandered even further afield before West spoke again. “What did you say?”

“I said - I’m tired.” But when I listened to my own voice the words were slurred and indistinct. As if…

It was a struggle to connect one thought to the next, but…

I had not been tired at all before I had sat down for this test. This intense fatigue had come on me quite suddenly, in a manner unprecedented in my lifetime. It had begun shortly after West drew the blood sample.

I laboriously turned my weak and protesting neck so that I might look to the left. There was a long needle in my arm, in the same place West had drawn the blood from, the same place he had swabbed with - some manner of numbing agent, so that I would suspect nothing -

And the needle was attached to a thin tube, and the tube to a tank in which I must suppose he had created a vacuum, and though I had at some point lost the ability to distinguish color, I thought the dark liquid in that tank must be a striking hue.

“West.” I had not the strength for an accusation; I was amazed there was even enough vigor left to me to feel horror at my circumstances.

He sighed. “Well, don’t get excited. If your heart rate accelerates, you’ll only die all the faster. And that would play havoc with my data - I was hoping to generate an accurate trend line.”

“West,” I said, and was able to muster some strength and urgency behind my voice this time.

He sounded bored. “I fully intend to put it back afterward.”

“How much?”

“How much am I taking, or how much will I return to you? Second question first: I only need that initial sample, which as you saw was quite small. You shall have all the rest back. As to your first question” - he looked at the tank filling with my blood, then at me, then adjusted his spectacles and calmly told me - “all of it.”

“You… bastard.” With all my failing strength, I struggled to raise my right hand, to reach across my chest and tear the needle from the opposite arm. But I knew I would not succeed, and I knew this even before West leaned over and pinned me down at the shoulder, an expression approximating pity on his face.

“There’s no call to fight it. People speak of death as the eternal sleep, but for the likes of us it’s no more than a catnap.” I was beginning to slip into unconsciousness, but in the last moments before I succumbed, West leaned in even closer, his face mere inches from mine. “Unless you annoy me. I have saved you in the past, but I can just as easily withhold the favor. If any part of you remembers this next time around, do yourself the favor of going quietly.”

“Next time?” I said. He sat back, chuckling to himself. My eyes closed, and I could not will them open again.

* * *

My eyes opened. It was morning, and West was speaking to me. “I’ll be gone for three hours. Don’t do anything stupid.” He started to walk away, then returned to the doorway and said, “Don’t do anything intelligent, either. Do as little as you can help.”

I did not even try to rise for the first half-hour, afraid my muscles would still show the same weak and sluggish responses of a slow death by exsanguination. But as I lay there and collected my thoughts again, I knew: I would have to find the secret laboratory today. I could not wait until the next time he was gone.

I got up. My body functioned as it should. I stopped on my way out of the house and extracted an odd assortment of keys from the pockets of West’s spare coat. And at the appointed distance, I found a wooden trapdoor, likely a former root cellar, beneath a skeletal tree that had already surrendered the last of its leaves to the oncoming winter. I hauled it open.

At the bottom of the stair stood a door.


	4. A Man Condemned

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, here we all are... for some reason. Thank you for bearing with me on this one.
> 
> And of course, especial thanks to the long-suffering [Moriri](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Moriri), whom I have never murdered, but who might find that fate preferable to looking through any of my rough drafts ever again.

I do not know what I expected to find in West's secret laboratory. But at the same time, I wonder that I can have been so surprised to encounter what I did. I had a certain and terrible knowledge of the man's capabilities, and suspicions of things even worse. How could I still have the capacity to be appalled at anything I might find?

And yet I hesitated before the door, and even when I had opened it I nearly closed it again and walked away at the first murmurings of sound from within. I feared this last secret might shatter my mind, in the same manner my body and spirit had been broken - and perhaps more than that, I feared that West would then reconstruct me afterward, with only fleeting nightmarish memories of what I had perceived.

I had known, certainly, that there would be humans in this lab. I had not known in what state I would find them, whether alive or dead - or otherwise. I do not say whether the tortured babel rolling forth from within West's most private laboratory confirmed the worst of my fears only because I cannot say with confidence which of my fears were the worst. There were men in there, or what remained of men, with enough sense to breathe and to attempt to speak. I believed the speech they attempted was English, but they succeeded only in a bastardized word here or there, two or three voices tripping incoherently over each other. In my horror I fell to intense deliberation, wondering if I should turn back. I believe the best part of a minute elapsed before I made my decision. I cannot help now but stop to consider how different my present circumstances would be if I had chosen differently.

The first room I entered was at first glance nondescript, to anyone as accustomed to West's habits as was I. There was no sign of the sources of the awful moaning; they must lie behind the second door at the end of the room.

For some time I only stood in the threshold, observing and bracing myself to breach the next chamber. Then I stopped and caught my breath. This room was not typical of the recent West, after all, but of an earlier incarnation. Herbert West in this day and age was not so scrupulously tidy; from his original precise and almost geometric organization of every cabinet and work bench he had devolved into something more idiosyncratic, and at the time of my death I would have characterized his preferred working environment as cluttered, verging at times upon unsanitary. He had returned somewhat to old habits since my death and return - for reasons I had not examined, only looking on the change with approval and relief - but this room in all its whitewashed sterility spoke of a more complete return to form, and for some reason the thought chilled me.

A simple laboratory notebook lay on a table on the far wall. I had tucked into my pocket a copy of each of West's ciphers I had managed to crack - but upon opening the book I found this one was in plain English. I supposed West must have been confident none could ever breach this sanctum - or perhaps he had intended one day to share these findings with me.

I discarded that thought immediately as inconceivable. More likely he only made his notes under such great pressure of time that he had no opportunity to cipher them. Observations of living creatures were often so.

At the phrase - _living creatures_ \- I became aware once again of the murmur beyond the door, and a shudder of revulsion passed over my scalp. I endeavored to ignore the sound as I began to read West's notes. For all I knew, he might soon come to discover me, so I began from the most recent page, hoping the newest information might be the most pertinent to what took place here.

_3 d trial no evident deterioration; performance of cognitive tests comparable to baseline. Agitation however noted in all subjects. Some vocal stereotypy; subj. 202 repeats "Please, I have a wife and child," verbatim, several times an hour from the moment I enter until lights out; uncertain what effect subj. expects this to have; continue to monitor. Behavior repeated sans evident objective suggests unsound mind. Postpone 4th trial._

A line was skipped, I assumed to indicate the passage of a day, then West continued:

_Terminated 202. Personally irritating. Sowing disquiet among other subjects. 4 th trial suspended indefinitely. Need new volunteers to confirm findings. Recalculate for larger sample size. Require another 4 vol. reagent._

After another blank line, the account went on:

_Terminated 201 and 203 for excess lacrimation._

This, then, was what the heightened manufacture of reagent had been for - a battery of further human test subjects secreted away on the property. And in this vague allusion to third and fourth trials I thought I saw the shadow of what West had done to me. Did he take all of them out to the river to drown them, I wondered, or had he resorted to a neater method of murder? Something that would not require exposing them to the light of day, and potentially to my inquiring eyes, would no doubt have suited him better.

I could easily have spent the remainder of the day poring over that appalling book. I could no doubt have pried the answers I sought from West's sparse prose, given time. But of time I knew not how much I had. I realized as well that the longer I lingered here, the less likely I should ever muster the nerve to investigate the voices I heard beyond the door, which despite my fear I knew to be a moral imperative. There were people locked away in this dungeon of science; people who had suffered and died horribly for West's cause, and found that even death permitted no release. I should learn as much as I could of West's experiments and then, if it were in my power, I should free these wretched souls.

And West himself - I supposed I would deal with him after. I closed the book and put it back exactly where I had found it, so that my subterfuge need not be exposed immediately, and braced myself to open the door.

This was another white and Spartan room, the far wall lined with empty tables. It was not as clean as the entryway; there were faint spatters of old blood on the wall in places, corresponding to where the heads of the tables had touched them. I thought of Subjects 201 through 203 and shuddered. When a body was intended for reanimation, one must take pains to keep it intact - but if it were to be terminated, there was no need of preserving the brains, and I had no doubt West's trusted revolver had come into play. A merciful end for the sufferer, surely, but a cataclysm for his nearest neighbors. Seeing now how closely together the tables were arranged, I could not wonder that those flanking the first victim had gone mad.

If indeed they had. "Excess lacrimation" was hardly conclusive proof in the circumstances. West had, as ever, no conception of appropriate human behavior. I rather thought, for his crimes against me and these poor strangers, that I should kill him.

I had made this resolution even before I permitted myself to look at the greatest horror this room contained. I have said that the tables were bare. Three of them were not.

One of the men had gone watchful and silent upon my entry; one muttered curses and other fragments of the most incoherent and debased strain of English; the last thrashed against his restraints and attempted to negotiate, in full voice, for his release. All were strapped down securely; all had had their shirts cut open; and from the left side of each chest emerged the bloody stem of a catheter. West had no doubt placed these for expediency's sake, so the reagent or any other drug could be injected directly into the heart. He must know, surely, the dangers of such a procedure - but I supposed in the face of a drug that could reverse death they must seem trifling. The site of insertion was, in one subject, severely bruised and showing the yellowish ooze of infection. This would be resolved when he died and the reagent restored him to life. It would not matter in the long term. The man would be in agony.

My initial revulsion was so great that it was some time longer before I realized a further point of commonality between all these unfortunates. With shaking hands I went to each in turn and granted a peaceful death, pumping into their hearts a dose of barbital from which they would not wake. I could not let them return to society with what they knew, but I could not let them suffer, and by the time West arrived with his reagent they would be too far gone to return to life.

But even when this merciful work was done, the sound of human voices had not ceased. I saw another door.

There were more men in the second room, in no better condition than the first, but one crucial difference made them even more horrifying to me. Nauseated with revulsion and pity, I did not tarry here any longer than need be, nor did I make eye contact or speak to the creatures on the tables. I killed them, quietly, and hurried out. My fingers were weak and fumbling as I struggled to secure each door behind me on my way out; by the time I emerged onto the grass of the lawn the weakness of terror had spread to my legs and I could hardly manage to stand. I stumbled a few paces to the nearest tree and there stopped, bracing myself against its trunk until perhaps I should find the strength to go on.

But go on to what? Could I flee? If I confronted West, could I truly overpower him? I doubted both propositions; though I was the larger and the stronger of us, I was much discomposed by what I had seen, and my friend - my tormentor - the lunatic to whom I had shackled my adult years - had never suffered the burden of scruples, and carried a gun besides. Undecided, I only stood in the shade and shivered, while my mind's eye presented me in perfect detail all that I had recently seen.

The men in the first room had all been small; I estimated none of the three stood above five feet, seven inches, and would readily assume the same of the dead men. That they were all thin I might have attributed to West's probable failure to feed them (what need, when a death by starvation was reversible?), but they had shared as well a slightness of skeleton that suggested slenderness even in health. I supposed, if one needed to kidnap anyone, those with smaller frames must be easier to transport and conceal, and I could not imagine West personally wrangling a larger specimen. I had found it chilling that they were all blond and blue-eyed, and all possessed a delicacy of feature bordering on the fey, but with a sample of only three this could still be a coincidence. Perhaps the dead men had possessed a different physiognomy. I could not prove otherwise.

But the second room abolished all my doubt, and all my hope with it. I had opened the second door to behold ten men bound and bruised, hideous glass stalks protruding from their chests, and at the sight of me their anguished vocalizations redoubled in fervor. As the first battery of subjects had borne a strange resemblance to West, every one of these wretches looked like me.

* * *

I returned in haste to my storage closet bedroom, cleaned my hands, and took up the adventure novel I had used as a shield for all these past weeks. I thought again that I should have changed it out for another by now, but this was no time to find a replacement. I only lay down on the bare mattress, held the book's pages open before my face, and wondered how I could best overpower West. The gun, I thought, presented the greatest obstacle. If only I could somehow separate him from it, I should have him at my mercy.

I did not know what I would do then - only that mercy as such was unlikely to factor in.

He returned within half an hour, and I could not doubt that he had seen his subjects first. He showed no suspicion toward me, but he was more than commonly pale and much disheveled, as any man might be who had just made a futile attempt to dispose of far too many bodies. There was blood on his hands, and in his hair where he had pushed his fingers through it. The state of his coat was yet more lamentable.

"Was your errand a success?" I asked him, and in part the question was guided by genuine curiosity. Indeed I did not know what hideous business had driven him from the house that day.

For a moment he looked as though he did not understand me. "My… errand. Yes. It was - most informative, if nothing else. Get a shovel and meet me outside; we have work to do."

He would, I supposed, want to hide the bodies, and few better methods suggested themselves than hiding these anonymous remains among the dead throngs of the potter's field. But remembering what had happened the last time, I did not want to go back there. Even if he did not yet suspect what I'd done, it was no stretch of the imagination to think he would kill me again and put me under the earth with his other victims.

Perhaps he wouldn't even kill me before he buried me. Perhaps he would want to know to what extent the slow crush of live burial could be reversed by his goddamned reagent. Perhaps -

"Well, hurry up," he said.

I looked at him over the top of the book, thinking. As noted, I was stronger than him. Moreover, he was disinclined to shoot me, preferring to conduct his homicides by less invasive methods where possible. If he were to learn of my actions in the laboratory, he would likely lose that reservation. Therefore, if I wished to defeat him, I was best assured of success if I attacked here and now.

But these sensible conclusions found a counterpoint in some more bestial part of my nature: I wanted him to know I had done it. I wanted him, before he died, to suffer.

West stared at me and fidgeted irritably while I entertained these conflicting impulses. At last I elected to bide my time, obtained the requested shovel, and followed him out.

As we walked toward the nightmarish dungeon of science I had so recently left, he said, "There is something you need to see."

I had entertained the notion of clubbing him with the shovel, but now I relaxed my grip; I wondered what he made of my handiwork or how he might choose to explain it. I realized I did not know what purpose underlay the experiment I'd sabotaged - and while that knowledge would never expiate West, nor render his means any less monstrous, I could have my answers now or not at all.

Thus I did not bash his brains out on the spot. I only asked "What is it?"

"The ideal drug," said West, "must have two properties. First, efficacy: it must accomplish its intended purpose. The reagent, as you yourself can attest, does this."

"And the other property?"

"Unintended effects must be minimal; if they cannot be eliminated altogether, they should be easy to monitor and control. That is to say that - insofar as is practical - this ideal drug must be safe." We had arrived at the cellar door. "This becomes more relevant if the substance is administered chronically. The risks are additive over time." He stared up at me intently. "At the time of your death, I was reasonably certain I could reanimate you without causing other untoward changes. But it occurred to me that you would inevitably die again, necessitating a second use of the reagent… a third…" He made gestures of infinite contempt for the very idea of dying; a bored condemnation of the frailty of flesh. "And so on."

I began to glimpse the outline of his mad plan. I nearly asked him if this was why he had killed me, but decided not to tip my hand. This speech of his besides held me in a sort of horrified fascination.

"You recall, I am sure, a certain unpleasant business wherein a dead madman expressed an interest in devouring us," said West.

"I don't know for certain. To which dead madman are you referring?"

"You aren't funny," he snapped. Then he looked down, frowning. After a moment's thought, he said, "The third one."

Guilelessly as I could manage, I asked, "Do you mean Halsey?"

"You know who I mean!" His voice was, momentarily, so pressurized and shrill that it might have etched glass. He paused and re-settled his glasses. "At any rate," he went on more calmly, "where a single injection of the reagent does not produce that result, I couldn't discount the possibility that such a syndrome would manifest after multiple doses. Hence I've been conducting the little confirmatory test I am about to show you. Leave the shovel here."

A "little confirmatory test," I thought, should not have such a stupendous death toll.

I deposited the shovel on the grass. West had me lever open the cellar door, led me down the stairs and unlocked the first test chamber. Two of the bodies were as I had left them. It appeared that a panicked West had tried to move the third; it lay on the floor at an odd angle, with a startling amount of postmortem injury to the face.

"I found a number of healthy subjects," said West, "and, with an eye to potential effects on personality or cognition, I've -"

"Killed them and brought them back."

"Precisely. Results were… inconclusive tending to positive for the first two rounds. There were alterations, but none of a violent nature. But the third…" He waved a despairing hand at the wreckage of human life. "Today - four days after the third injection - I returned to find them all dead."

He turned to me. "This has disturbing implications for your condition. Naturally I intend to make adjustments to the reagent and run the experiment again, but as matters stand, if you were to suffer another collapse like the first, I could make no guarantees." He shook his head. "I didn't intend to tell you about this until I had favorable results. But now - well, we have several bodies to dispose, and then there's the matter of finding replacement subjects. I will…" He swallowed, and his eyes darted away briefly before re-centering on me. "I need your help."

I stared down at him - a murderer, a monster, and fully prepared to do it all again - and for all that such a contemptible creature, so weak, so small.

I told him, "Then you shouldn't have killed me."

"What?"

"There's no need for the pretense, West. I remember all of it. I always have."

His eyes widened. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"The stream," I said. "You drowned me there."

"Don't be absurd," he said, but took a step back all the same. His brow furrowed. "The only thing that happened at the stream was you making an ass of yourself. I'll admit I had, and have, very little sympathy for such scenes, but to say I would kill you for it is hyperbolic."

I took a step closer. "You beat me to death with a shovel. Is it the same one I left upstairs? Did you find that amusing, thinking I wouldn't remember?"

He shook his head. His spectacles slid down his nose. "You're talking complete nonsense -"

I continued my advance until, having hit the wall, he could retreat no further. "Strangled me," I said, "poisoned me, stabbed me, drained all my blood -"

"Listen to me -"

I slammed my fist into the wall beside his head; he winced and fell silent, trembling slightly. "West," I said quietly, "when I died for the first time, can you swear to me that you didn't know why? Or was it your doing even then?"

"Of course I didn't know! I still don't! You're insane to even suggest -" He stopped, his eyes going unfocused. When he spoke again, his voice was barely audible. "My god. Have I been wrong all this time?"

"In murdering your only friend? Yes, I daresay you have."

"I've never killed you." His unsteady gaze wandered slowly back up to my face. "That would be self-defeating. But I think it's too late." He shook himself. "Tell me. What proof do you have of my guilt?"

"I remember it. What proof do you have that you're innocent?"

"Look at yourself. No lasting injuries -"

"The reanimation process would reverse some damage -"

"Some, not all. There would still be some sign -"

"You were too careful to leave a mark I could see. You got rid of all the mirrors!"

"I got rid of the mirrors," West said flatly, "because, in case you went the way of previous subjects, I didn't want you armed."

"With a mirror?"

"Mirrors are easily shattered, and then you could conceal a piece somewhere on your person and wait for your opportunity. I am not an idiot."

"Neither am I. You admit to all these other murders" - I looked back at the three men behind us. I had killed them most recently, but he had done it first - "and you think I'll believe you hesitated over mine?"

He adjusted his glasses indignantly. "It was not murder, it was _research_ , and rather costly and strenuous research I undertook _for your sake_. If this is the gratitude I can expect for my pains, don't think I'll -"

"If it was for my sake, then why did the first six subjects all look like you?"

He opened his mouth as if to retort, but then froze. After a few seconds he said, "There are only three in this room." I did not answer. "You've been here before." I held my silence, watching the realization break over him. "You - you wouldn't have - of course you wouldn't be stupid enough to sabotage your own interests." But I continued to stare at him, and he at me, and I could see the precise moment that certainty left him. "Would you?"

"I freed them," I told him calmly, "from the same unending torment you inflicted on me."

"No," he whispered.

I leaned in close over him. In the end he was a frail and frightened thing, and I could not understand now how I had allowed him so much power. "And now I'm going to free myself."

He reached for his gun, but I had expected that, and reacted no less quickly. I forced his hand back down before he could bring it up to fire. He braced his back against the wall and kicked at the inside of my knee. My leg crumpled beneath me, pitching me forward - I had intended to drive an elbow into his throat, but unbalanced as I was, I only hit the wall. Pain shot up my arm, but I could spare no attention for that now, as with my other hand I was still struggling with West for control of the gun.

It went off, with a sound nearly thunderous in that confined space. The recoil broke West's tenuous grip. I jerked the weapon away from him, and only once this was done did I become aware of the hot stinging line down my side, traced by the bullet that must have grazed me.

West collapsed to the floor. Despite the pain I made myself straighten, deliberately broke the revolver open and shook out the remaining bullets. These I put into my pocket. I did not know yet what I meant to do with him, but so clean a death - so much quicker than any of those he had granted me - did not feel appropriate. For the time being I only stood over him and looked down, feeling a cold pride at the terror so plain on his face.

"You say you remember me killing you," he said. His voice was high and strained, the words coming almost too quickly for comprehension. "But think. What reason would I have to do that? To jeopardize everything I've tried to achieve?"

At length I said, "Precisely what was it you were trying to achieve?"

For a moment his fear was punctured by indignation. He ceased cowering, glared up at me, and snapped, "We were going to live forever, you imbecile! And you've ruined it! How can you possibly be so stupid? We'd have had all eternity to do as we pleased. We could have known everything, lived like the ancient philosopher-kings - don't you understand? The instant either of us died, the other could bring him back, forever. We'd never have to -"

"I see," I said. "Tell me something, West. Have we ever been friends? Or is it only that your grand vision called for someone else to hold the syringe?"

He began shaking again; the fervor left him. He lowered his gaze. "I didn't kill you. That should be answer enough." He smiled strangely. "It would have been fascinating, too. That was a real sacrifice."

"But you did kill me."

"I have a theory," said West, after a long silence. He still would not look up, instead staring fixedly at my shoes. "It is not one that I like. But perhaps… the reagent's actions on the brain… were not eliminated. Maybe I only managed to make them more insidious."

"What?"

"I submit that you have been hallucinating," he said. "All this trouble I went to to ensure your safety - all for nothing. All too late." He shook his head and issued a tense, mirthless laugh. "It was over from the moment you woke. From the first and only injection I gave you, the reagent has already sent you mad."

I did not believe him. Even if my body bore no such testament, I remembered each wound he had given me. I remembered the demoniac light in his eyes. I could not have imagined such horrors. I did not feel that I was mad.

"If you will allow me to leave this laboratory alive," said West, "I swear to you we need never cross paths again. I won't look for you. Make what you can of your new life. I will" - he swallowed hard, and then a second time - "I will start from scratch, somewhere far away from here."

"'From scratch,'" I repeated.

"Yes. I think I can learn to make do without an assistant. I'll need to reformulate - and much larger sample sizes, yes, not to mention a more robust -"

I looked over my shoulder at the corpses behind me, and at the door behind which lay so many more. "You would do this again," I said.

"Not precisely this experiment, no. This was - your death presented an extenuating circumstance. I can probably afford to be more discreet, without…"

"You would take strangers from their homes -"

"In point of fact, they came here themselves." That familiar air of self-satisfaction briefly shone through. "I placed a classified advertisement, and -"

"And that was why you wouldn't let me see the newspapers?"

"As I said, I intended to tell you myself once there was a favorable result."

A favorable result, I thought, of killing me and all these men? No. Herbert West must not go free, and he must not repeat these little trials of his here or anywhere else. And he must pay.

In a flash of inspiration I realized how this could best be accomplished. Without taking my eyes off him, I edged sideways until I reached the table where West had kept his implements and prepared doses of the reagent for his subjects. I sorted through the small collection of bottles on it until I found one with a likely-looking label, and after a moment retrieved from beneath the table the syringe I had used to carry out my act of mercy. West watched me do this; no part of him moved save his eyes.

I pressed these articles upon him. "Sedate yourself."

He nearly dropped them, so great was the shaking in his hands. "What?"

I drew out his gun and the ammunition and loaded precisely one bullet into place. "If your wish to leave this place alive is in earnest, kindly inject yourself. I believe you know how. Two hours of immobility should be enough."

"I don't -"

I pulled back the hammer and took deliberate aim between his eyes. He rolled up his sleeve, withdrew a volume from the bottle, and injected it into his arm without further ado. I did not take the gun off him; we simply stared at each other in motionless silence until the drug took hold. Being a small man, West responded quickly - it was only a minute or two before the expected lassitude began to creep over him. His eyes drifted closed. "I trusted you," he said petulantly. "Or… nearly enough…" Before much longer he slumped down like a boneless thing.

I waited for him to go still, then checked his pockets in case there was some trick waiting for me. Upon finding only scraps of paper bearing fragments of his peculiar shorthand, I slung his inert form over my shoulder and left the laboratory.

Had I always had such strength? I wondered. Or was this the reagent in action?

It hardly mattered. I stowed West in my erstwhile bedroom and locked it tightly, knowing it could not be opened from within. In case he woke before my return, I could simply have the gun ready before I entered. In the meantime, I had preparations to make.

* * *

But my caution was not needed; West had yet to awaken when I returned. I sat down next to him and kept watch for the return of consciousness. My plan must not proceed until I knew he was lucid.

When his eyes opened at last they were wide, unfocused, glazed with a vague fear; when they fell upon me his expression became one of relief. Moments later that, too, passed, but this time the horror that took its place was quite specific.

"Hello, West," I said.

"I don't understand. I thought you would kill me." I didn't answer. "And yet it seems you've changed your mind - why?"

I told him, "I haven't."

We sat in silence some while longer as he fumbled with this apparent contradiction and the lingering effects of the drug on his thoughts. Finally he asked me, "What will you do?"

I had spent quite some time, as I doused the laboratory in volatile chemicals and arranged the materials for a quick and violent fire, deliberating precisely how I should dispose of him. Having hit upon a plan I had then debated - as I struck a lucifer match on the edge of a table and threw it into a heap of papers awash in shimmering fumes - how much of it I should tell him, and how much leave him to work out for himself.

The consideration that ultimately decided me was this: if I told him nothing, I risked not being present when he realized. And so at length I said, "I will give you your eternal life." The expression on his face rewarded my decision. Of course, this disclosure also cost me any element of surprise - but so much stronger was I than this pathetic child-sized creature that it little mattered.

I could not, though it would have pleased me, recreate exactly the murder he had visited upon Robert Leavitt of St. Louis - the first man I knew him to have killed. I could at least do this: shove him onto the bed, place a pillow over his face and bear down until he ceased thrashing.

As his hands finally stopped clawing for purchase I wondered idly why he had never killed me in this fashion, whether in fact or in my dreams.

Once satisfied, I removed the pillow from his face and examined my work. He was not breathing, and the blotchy spots of color that the struggle had brought to his face were beginning to recede. It was not on the whole a face of peaceful repose, as I was most glad to note. The frame of his glasses had broken under the pressure, which I had not thought of; but the lenses were intact, so that he would still be able to see. This would become important in coming hours.

I was not yet ready for him, but the reagent took time to wreak its changes upon the body, and a prompt injection made all the difference. I regarded the syringe in silence a few moments before I drove the needle into his flesh, examining the greenish liquid he believed had driven me mad.

I did not know if this were true or not; what truly mattered was that he seemed to believe it.

With the reanimation process beginning, there was little time left to me. Once more I shouldered the burden of his body, now providing even less resistance than before, and brought him outside. I had previously brought out here the chains with which he had first bound me to my bed upon my revival. I wound these around him to secure him to a tree facing the property, with an unobstructed view of the acrid chemical smoke arising from his laboratory - his life's work, and the work of my death. It was my wish that he should awaken to this vista and know that everything was gone, and believe that, with the reagent now in his veins, his mind would soon shatter such that he could never start anew.

I returned briefly to the house to place a phone call. I told the operator of a suspected fire, of a dark and oily smog rising above the trees outside of town. Perhaps I had heard voices crying out from that direction, I said, but with the wind being inconstant I was not certain. Despite further questioning, I insisted I dared not speculate whether the hubbub originated at the home of that strange doctor; I disclaimed knowledge of any such person.

Someone would be sent. They would have difficulty quelling a fire of this nature, I knew, but I dared not give any specific instructions for subduing it. This would only reveal that my knowledge of the thing was more complete than I pretended, and my own actions over the years stood up to inquiry little better than West's.

Only after disconnecting did it occur to me that it did not matter what crimes I was known or suspected to have a part in. But there was no time to correct my oversight now. I told myself the operator would have relayed the information incorrectly at any rate, and on my way out induced the stove to explode.

The fire would die eventually, regardless. And West should be collected and shut away in an asylum for the rest of his immortal years. Perhaps he and Halsey would cross paths again. I regretted that I would never see such a thing transpire.

I thought of the monster we had made of the old Dean. I should have severed ties with West then. I should have known no good would come.

As I crossed the lawn back to West, I wondered whether he was telling the truth of my death. But it should not make a difference even so. Suppose he had not killed me personally; he had still filled a laboratory with victims in my name. He was in no way innocent, and had not been in some time. He must suffer for it. It should not matter if he had never raised a hand to harm me; the scales weighed heavily enough against him that a difference of one soul could not signify.

And yet I wondered still. In truth I continue to wonder, prodding at the speculation as at a loose tooth, but my decision cannot be taken back now.

I came at last to the tree I had bound him to. Circulation had returned, and as my feet cracked the dry autumn grass on approach his eyelids began to flutter.

"Welcome back," I said. "Do you understand how you got here?" For it would mean nothing, or less than nothing, if he did not.

He turned toward my voice, and then toward the fire; he tried to approach the laboratory, to salvage something or put a stop to the blaze, but found the chains arresting him. At this his eyes went wild; he struggled like a mindless beast to escape the slaughter that had already occurred. The chains held fast, and even by going completely limp he was unable to slip out from beneath them.

"In case you don't, allow me to explain -"

"No need," he said.

I smiled. "I thought not. Then you know that the reagent -" 

"I know!" He redoubled his struggle, but again found no escape. Breathless, he turned to me. "You needn't - I can't - we can fix this. The reagent madness is probably reversible - at least treatable - we can make that our next project. Just let me go and recover some things from the lab. I'll set this right. We can be as we were - as we should have been -"

I said nothing. West made another futile pull at the chains. "It'd be simplicity itself," he said, a wheedling note entering his voice, "testing a drug on the criminally insane; no one cares what happens to _them._ And supposing the treatment worked and we did reform them into productive members of society, well! It would be for their own good! Isn't that the kind of thing you like? Doing things for other people's good? Whatever misguided sentiment led you to sabotage my work, surely it would have no objections - you're a scientist, aren't you? You'll release me, and you won't flinch at what's necessary -"

He had said two things in this time that, for my purposes, were entirely true. First: no one cared what happened to madmen and murderers. Second: I would not flinch.

At last, in the face of my continued silence, West went quite still. "You fool," he said, and no more.

I observed him dispassionately, and after a moment leaned forward and spoke quietly into his ear: "The subject shows excess lacrimation. Perhaps it should be terminated."

"I was only trying to save you."

"You were only trying to save yourself."

"Both of us, then."

I could not help but sneer at him. At length I said, "Help will come for you, though not help that you will like." I stood back. "We're finished, West. I have no further business with you."

"Yes," he said, "I thought the cold-blooded murder actually made that point quite well -"

I turned and began to walk away, toward the fire.

I will reach it soon. I can feel the heat on my face; the thick smoke stings my lungs. This is my last revenge. I intend for West to see me die. I suppose even with my destruction and that of all his apparatus, his chemical stocks, and his notes - I suppose if he is ever free again he could reverse-engineer the reagent from his own blood.

But of course I doubt very much that he will ever leave Sefton Asylum under his own power, or long retain his reason.

We understood so little, all along, of what the reagent could do. I begin to suspect my reanimated body has enhanced tolerances against certain environmental strain. Though the heat does not feel unbearable to me, the fluid in my eyeballs is beginning to steam.

I turn and look back, while the power of sight remains to me, at Herbert West. And I salute him, one monster to another.


End file.
